Google Suggest

Cristiano writes "As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's 'Did you mean?' feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time." It crashes Konqueror, but works nicely on Mozilla. Update: 12/11 by J : The engineer who thought of it, then built it in his "20% time," blogs about the process.

Comments

Try this:

[elid]

Type in g. Then type o. Then type o again. And again. Keep typing o's... Look what happens :-)

Re:Try this:

[kzinti]

So why is it that goooooooooooooooogle, with 16 o's, has over 23000 hits, while strings with one more or one fewer o have only hundreds of hits?

gooooooooooooooogle 618
goooooooooooooooogle 23,300
gooooooooooooooooogle 198

I thought maybe it was a power-of-two thing, but other such disparities happen at non 2^n transitions. Interesting.

How is it so FAST!?

[topham]

It is blazingly fast. I expected it to be slowwwww.
Can somebody outline how it works?

Re:How is it so FAST!?

[loconet]

Everytime you type a letter, it requests a special modified version of the search tool which only returns the necessary javascript data.

check itout

Impressive

The ABCs of Google Complete

[Hatta]

A is for Amazon
B is for Best Buy
C is for CNN
D is for Dictionary
E is for Ebay
F is for Firefox (yay!)
G is for Games
H is for Hotmail
I is for Ikea
J is for Jokes
K is for Kazaa
L is for Lyrics
M is for Mapquest
N is for News
O is for Online dictionary
P is for Paris Hilton (wtf?!)
Q is for Quotes
R is for Recipes
S is for Spybot
T is for Tara Reid
U is for Ups
V is for Verizon
W is for Weather
X is for Xbox
Y is for Yahoo
Z is for Zip Codes

Re:The ABCs of Google Complete

[dwvanstone]

Just to add to the list:

1 is for 1
2 is for 2004 election
3 is for 3m
4 is for 411
5 is for 50 cent
6 is for 60 minutes
7 is for 7th heaven
8 is for 89.com (as bad as Paris Hilton!!)
9 is for 911

Re:The ABCs of Google Complete

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain THIS though:
x : xbox
xx: xxl
xxx:

p: paris hilton
po: poems
por: porsche
porn:

s: spybot
se: sears
sex:

Somehow, I don't think these are based purely on search requests :)

Re:Cool! Just like form AutoComplete

[ciroknight]

This is why Google is such an awesome concept.

Instant access to any piece of human knowledge, and it now can guess what you are looking for right as you can type. The only next improvement I can think of is if it did related searches to the term you searched for, but I'm not sure how you would represent all of that data at once. Leave it to the Google geniuses ;)

Re:Wow

[Freexe]

Its javascript, using the XMLHTTP object to communicate with the server directly

You can see it http://www.google.com/ac.js cant say i understand it, Gmail using the same thing but way more advanced.

Re:Cool! Just like form AutoComplete

[Chris Mattern]

Nice, but not answering his question. He didn't ask what O(n) was, he asked what n is, and that's a legitimate question. What *is* n? What is the determining factor of problem size for this algorithm? The number of characters the user has typed? The size of the database of terms Google will search? What?

Chris Mattern

Advertising potential?

[gavint]

Looks nice, but what happens when you type "the"?

"the incredibles"

Is anyone else seeing the advertising possibilities?

Obfuscated Javascript

[jdludlow]

http://www.google.com/ac.js

The Javascript is ripped to shreds as far as readability goes, but buried in there somewhere is the key to making your own app based on this. If you were so inclined to piggy-back on top of this technology. Not that I'd advocate such things.

// Copyright 2004 and onwards Google Inc.

var w="";var pa=false;var ta="";var da=false;var g="";var G="";var m="";var j=-1;var h=null;var Z=-1;var za=null;var Ca=5;var q="";var Lb="div";var Bb="span";var la=null;var a=null;var b=null;var Xa=null;var mb=null;var X=null;var ha=null;var ra=false;var kc=null;var hc=null;var Ua=new Object();var ca=1;var Aa=1;var Y=false;var na=-1;var Va=(new Date()).getTime();var Q=false;var k=null;var sa=null;var E=null;var B=null;var aa=null;var Ba=false;var Ka=false;var p=60;var ia=null;var ya=null;var W=0;InstallAC=function(frm,fld,sb,pn,rl,hd,sm,ufn) {la=frm;a=fld;Xa=sb;if(!pn)pn="search";ia=pn;var Kb="en|";var Jb="zh-CN|zh-TW|ja|ko|vi|";if(!rl||Kb.indexOf(rl+" |")==-1)rl="en";ha=nb(rl);if(Jb.indexOf(ha+"|")==- 1){X=true;Y=false;Ba=false}else{X=false;if(ha.inde xOf("zh")==0)Y=false;else Y=true;Ba=true}if(!hd)hd=false;ya=hd;if(!sm)sm="qu ery";w=sm;mb=ufn;ac()}
;function Yb(){ra=true;a.blur();setTimeout("sfi();",10);retu rn}
function Fb(){if(document.createEventObject){var y=document.createEventObject();y.ctrlKey=true;y.ke yCode=70;document.fireEvent("onkeydown",y)}}
func tion nc(vb){var y=document.createEventObject();y.ctrlKey=true;y.ke yCode=vb;document.fireEvent("onkeydown",y)}
funct ion gc(event){}
function ic(event){}
function Pb(event){if(!event&&window.event)event=window.eve nt;if(event)na=event.keyCode;if(event&&event.keyCo de==8){if(X&&(a.createTextRange&&(event.srcElement ==a&&(bb(a)==0&&lb(a)==0)))){cc(a);event.cancelBub ble=true;event.returnValue=false;return false}}}
function mc(){}
function Db(){if(w=="url"){Ha()}ba()}
function ba(){if(b){b.style.left=ob(a)+"px";b.style.top=Qb( a)+a.offsetHeight-1+"px";b.style.width=Ja()+"px"}}
function Ja(){if(navigator&&navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase ().indexOf("msie")==-1){return a.offsetWidth-ca*2}else{return a.offsetWidth}}
function ac(){if(jb()){Q=true}else{Q=false}if(pa)E="complet e";else E="/complete/"+ia;sa=E+"?hl="+ha;if(!Q){qa("qu","" ,0,E,null,null)}la.onsubmit=Fa;a.autocomplete="off ";a.onblur=Ob;if(a.createTextRange)a.onkeyup=new Function("return okuh(event); ");else a.onkeyup=okuh;a.onsubmit=Fa;g=a.value;ta=g;b=docu ment.createElement("DIV");b.id="completeDiv";ca=1; Aa=1;b.style.borderRight="black "+ca+"px solid";b.style.borderLeft="black "+ca+"px solid";b.style.borderTop="black "+Aa+"px solid";b.style.borderBottom="black "+Aa+"px solid";b.style.zIndex="1";b.style.paddingRight="0" ;b.style.paddingLeft="0";b.style.paddingTop="0";b. style.paddingBottom="0";ba();b.style.visibility="h idden";b.style.position="absolute";b.style.backgro undColor="white";document.body.appendChild(b);Ma(" ",new Array(),new Array());Gb(b);var s=document.createElement("DIV");s.style.visibility ="hidden";s.style.position="absolute";s.style.left ="-10000";s.style.top="-10000";s.style.width="0";s .style.height="0";var M=document.createElement("IFRAME");M.completeDiv=b ;M.name="completionFrame";M.id="complet

Re:Google starts to suck

[diamondsw]

So they screwed up Groups. What does that have to do with Suggest, which looks like a classic "awesome! why didn't anyone else do it that way?" Google feature?